Holiday Cheer from Google Analytics

Happy holiday season everyone. A week back, Google folks announced the following holiday bonus features which I consider as most needed and easy to play around with data in GA.

Annotations

When the report data goes up (or down), web analysts need to spend little time to find the exact reason by digging traffic sources/new visits/keywords. Annotation is to track data raise/fall due to changes/updates that we have done in the website. Make sure to add the annotations for changes you think will influence the GA data. It will be live by January first week. Following is the video with live demo to setup annotation.

Easier Tracking Code setup

Configuring GATC (Google analytics Tracking Code) according to the website is really a time consuming work. No more worries. Also now it’s very easy to set up the campaign tracking. Now, these all can be specified while creating account itself (see the below screenshot).

More dimensions and metrics

New data dimensions and metrics are available to have the more flexible reporting structure. I’m really having fun time in implementing multiple custom variables, custom variables in custom segmentation and custom variables in custom reports.

Custom Alerts (released sometime back)

I really love this custom alert. This feature adds more joy to internet marketing companies as they deal with many accounts in GA.
You can set an alert if the report data goes down or nil report. You’ll receive an E-mail for all the accounts (if an alert is set up) that you registered in GA.

GA to compete with Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA)

A month back, YWA was launched with many good features that web analytics software should have. Recently I’ve been noticing GA has released many good features as Google has to compete with the new web analytics software YWA. Anyhow, it’s a good time for web analysts to get all these new stuffs.

Additional Tip

Avinash Kaushik has just released his book Web Analytics 2.0 (just ordered and looking forward to read this). Happy holdiays!